life ascendant

life ascendant

fiction
edward  w pritchard


The cold water is full of chemicals and limes and rusts seeping from deep underground pools of slushy industrial wastes from back when Barberton was on the ascendancy into the industrial revolution becoming the match making center of this part of the border to the emerging Western sections of the nascent United States. That crusty polluted rusty waters flowed West draining all the Portage Lakes flowing quickly after a once a century flash flood through the wide open Locks into a deluge down the rejuvenated Tuscawarus river across the mushy ancient graves of old Indian chief Captain Pipe and his sad lonely squaws and extinct Indians who lived in the Indian villages of Pipetown and three or four other Indian burrows and villages near sunny Nesbitt Lake.

Somehow life began anew from all those industrial pollutants and solvents oozing again and again over those extinct Indian graves and bones mixing with the rusts and irons and vitamins from the bleached soggy body parts and skins and Indian babies began to grow and thrive  there in the rich vucousy muck thriving in silence, maturing without Mothers or fathers into good sturdy specimens  becoming solid american citizens ready to work and consume and incidentally revitalize the Cleveland-akron-canton MSA  into the 22nd century.

Good jobs are important for the Indians [ called hereafter native american] babies born without Mothers or fathers seeded and hatched from the muddy pollutants of nineteenth century american Industrial growth. When next shopping at the local dollar store give that weary, tired but pretty cashier with the high cheekbones a nod: she well could be a descendant of Old Captain Pipe the Indian chief who founded civilization here in the greater Cleveland Lake Erie basin.